The space station dodges debris from a Russian anti-satellite test
The International Space Station (ISS) has just taken evasive action to avoid a fragment of a satellite destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite test in November 2021.
On Monday (Oct. 24) at 8:25 p.m. EDT (0025 GMT Oct. 25), the ISS team fired the engines on Progress 81a Russian cargo ship attached to the station, a total of five minutes and five seconds to avoid the wreckage, according to a NASA statement (opens in a new tab).
The agency said this “predetermined debris avoidance maneuver” (PDAM) was performed to “provide the complex with an additional measure of distance from the predicted path” of the debris fragment.
The maneuver raised the ISS’s altitude by 0.2 miles (0.32 kilometers) at apogee (farthest point from Earth) and 0.8 miles (1.3 km) at perigee (closest point to Earth), according to NASA. The launch of the engine did not affect the normal operation of the space station.
On the subject: The test of the Russian anti-satellite missile caused condemnation of space companies and countries
The piece of debris that triggered the evasive maneuver was generated by a Russian test of an anti-satellite direct-altitude (ASAT) missile. held on November 15, 2021. The rocket, launched from the ground, destroyed a defunct Soviet satellite known as Kosmos 1408, which had been decommissioned since the 1980s.
“There’s no reason they would use such a large target,” said astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. told Space.com at the time. “They could have used a smaller target and created less debris.”
Test since then caused widespread condemnation from space agencies and space policy experts from around the world and pushed astronauts aboard the ISS snuggle up.
This is not the first time International space station had to avoid the debris left over from the Russian ASAT test. In June 2022, space made a similar maneuver to avoid the Cosmos 1408 fragment.
After the Russian ASAT test carried out on Cosmos 1408, several countries have committed do not perform destructive ASAT tests to help prevent the spread space debris in orbit. Among them are the Republic of Korea, Germany, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Great Britain.
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https://www.space.com/international-space-station-dodges-russian-space-debris/ The space station dodges debris from a Russian anti-satellite test
